Cavanaugh Standoff

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Put it down, Olivia. Please, put it down,” Sierra pleaded. “Don’t take the easy way out.”

  That infuriated the woman, just as Sierra hoped it would. “Easy way? You think this is the easy way?” she demanded hotly, her eyes blazing.

  The distraction was all that Ronan needed. Flying forward, he caught her, one hand going around her waist while he grabbed the hand holding the weapon with the other. He pushed her hand upward so that the muzzle was now aimed at the ceiling, the same ceiling her mother had been staring at for the last two years.

  Sierra immediately jumped in to grab the woman’s hand, as well. With Ronan holding Olivia, she managed to wrestle the handgun away from Olivia.

  Once separated from her weapon, Olivia dissolved into angry, despairing tears and sank to the floor, crying hysterically.

  Sierra looked down at the handgun. It was a 9 mm Smith & Wesson. “I think we’ve found our murder weapon,” she told Ronan.

  “And our serial killer,” he added with a surety she wasn’t used to hearing in his voice.

  Sierra nodded. It was over. The nightmare was over. All that was left was to get answers to a myriad of outstanding questions.

  A deep sigh escaped her as she looked at the sobbing woman in their custody. “So why don’t I feel good about this?” she asked quietly.

  The look in Ronan’s eyes told her he understood.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Taking out her handcuffs, Sierra bent over Olivia to apply the steel restraints to the woman’s wrists.

  It all happened so fast, Sierra was caught completely off guard.

  One moment their prisoner was a sobbing, broken heap on the floor. The next, uttering a guttural shriek, Olivia twisted around and lunged at her, holding a long, thin, blue knitting needle in her hand like a weapon.

  In the kitchen, looking to see if the phone number for the aide who took care of Olivia’s mother was posted on the refrigerator door, Ronan was alerted by the shriek and immediately sprinted back into the living room.

  “Sierra?” he cried, confused and looking at his partner who was in turn pinning down their prisoner with her knee to the woman’s neck. “Is everything all right?”

  “It is now,” she told him, panting. It had been touch and go for a moment, but she’d managed to overpower Olivia and wrestle the woman to the floor. Still trying to get her breath, she said to Ronan, “You put the cuffs on her. I’m afraid if I move, she’ll get loose again.”

  “Gladly,” he told Sierra, taking the cuffs from her.

  It was only after he’d handcuffed the woman and yanked her to her feet that he actually looked at Sierra and saw it. There was blood all along the left shoulder of her shirt. It was coming from the hole created by the knitting needle that was, appallingly, still stuck in the fleshy part of her shoulder.

  “You’re bleeding,” he informed her, stunned. Like a man standing in the middle of a puzzle, he struggled to put the pieces together. “What the hell happened in here?”

  Sierra tried to shrug and found that she couldn’t, not without feeling a shooting pain going from her shoulder through the rest of her.

  She pushed on through the pain. “All I can guess is that when she crumbled to the floor, she must have found a knitting needle next to her mother’s bed. When I tried to pull her to her feet, she lunged at me, trying to stab me with it.”

  “She did stab you,” he corrected angrily. “And it’s still sticking out of your shoulder. You need to go to the hospital to have that removed and your wound taken care of.”

  But to his horror, Sierra was already pulling the knitting needle out of her shoulder and covering the wound with a handkerchief.

  “What I need to do is go to the medicine cabinet and get a Band-Aid for it,” she corrected. “And you need to call for backup so that they can take her to the precinct to be booked,” she told him. “And don’t take your eyes off her until someone gets here. She just might try to take a chunk out of your ear,” Sierra warned as she made her way to the rear of the house, looking for a bathroom.

  She found the bathroom, but not before she found Olivia’s room. What she saw there had her stopping short. One wall was covered with newspaper clippings and pictures, all dealing with the street gang members who’d eventually found their way into a drawer at the morgue. In addition, one side of that wall was devoted to the two police officers who had also met their end, thanks to the handcuffed woman in the other room.

  “Wow,” Sierra murmured under her breath as she scanned the various articles and pictures. The woman had really been obsessed with killing these people.

  Starting to feel a little light-headed because of the blood loss, Sierra went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Just as she’d suspected, there was everything within the small cabinet that she needed to clean, disinfect and bandage her wound.

  She was just about finished and shrugging back into her blouse when she heard the wail of approaching sirens in the distance.

  “Sierra, what’s taking you so long?” Ronan called out, concerned that maybe she’d passed out.

  “Just getting this thing cleaned up,” she answered, then added, “And getting an education. You need to get the CSI unit down here,” she told him, crossing back into the living room.

  She saw that not only had he handcuffed Olivia’s hands behind her back, he also had one of her wrists cuffed to the refrigerator handle.

  “After what she pulled on you, I’m not taking any chances,” Ronan said.

  “I’m not blaming you. I just hope you have the keys to those cuffs. Otherwise, they’re going to have to load that refrigerator onto a truck along with her.”

  “Worse comes to worst, we can take the door off its hinges,” he deadpanned. “She can drag the door along in her wake.”

  “Funny man,” Olivia jeered, then spat at his shoes. “Real funny. Maybe that’s why you people can’t get anything done. You’re just a bunch of comedians.”

  Ronan looked completely unruffled, but Sierra could tell he was holding his temper in check.

  “We got you, didn’t we?” he said in a calm, laid-back voice that only succeeded in infuriating the other woman further.

  A string of curses emerged from Olivia’s mouth. She wound up screaming at both of them.

  Ronan turned to Sierra. “What’s that old rhyme about sticks and stones?” he asked her.

  “And knitting needles,” she quipped. “Don’t forget knitting needles.”

  He obliged. “Yeah, those, too. But ‘words’ll never hurt me’ I think is the rest of it.”

  Instead of a patrol officer, because of their proximity, Martinez and Choi were the first on the scene. They walked into the house and saw the woman handcuffed to the refrigerator.

  “So it really was her,” Choi commented. “It’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for.”

  “Glad I didn’t bet on the brother,” Martinez said as he flanked Olivia’s other side.

  Ronan uncuffed her from the refrigerator handle.

  “My brother?” Olivia echoed, scoffing at the very idea that he could have done what she had done. “That wimp? He couldn’t even defend himself against a girl,” she jeered with an unmistakable air of superiority.

  Martinez looked at Ronan, but it was Sierra who spoke up. “We think she killed her brother, too.”

  Olivia tossed her head defiantly. “He didn’t deserve to live. He was running out on our mother, leaving me to deal with everything. All he could think of was himself, the useless SOB,” she cried angrily.

  He’d had enough of the woman for now. “Just get her down to the precinct and book her,” Ronan instructed the two detectives.

  “And be careful,” Sierra cautioned. “She’s a lot more dangerous than you think.”

  T
hat was when Choi saw the blood on her shoulder. “What the hell happened to you, Carlyle?” he asked.

  “Our serial killer found a new use for a knitting needle,” Ronan said, crossing over to take a closer look at Sierra’s shoulder. “You’re bleeding through the bandage,” he told her, adding in a grave voice, “You need that looked at.”

  “So look at it,” she quipped.

  “We’ll see you at the station,” Martinez said, herding the prisoner out along with his partner.

  Ronan’s attention was focused on his stubborn partner. “By a professional.”

  “You’re a professional,” she countered innocently.

  “Damn it, Carlyle, you know what I mean. A doctor. You need a doctor.”

  “And you can play doctor,” she told him. Before he could say anything in response, she said, “But first you need to see this.”

  “See what?” he asked, finding himself following her to the rear of the house.

  “The reason I told you to call the CSI unit. Pronto,” she added.

  He began to tell her that she wasn’t going to distract him from forcing her to go to the ER, but the words never made it to his tongue. Having walked into the bedroom behind her, he was stunned speechless as he looked at the far wall. The newspaper clippings and photographs amounted to a huge collage devoted to all the people involved in Darren Campbell’s untimely death.

  Ronan emitted a low whistle. “She’s been at this for a while.”

  Sierra nodded, looking at the clippings again, this time a little more slowly as she scanned a few of the more recent articles.

  “That she has. She’s got a notebook there,” she told Ronan, pointing to a small, beaten up notebook on a side desk. “It’s divided up into sections—one for each gang member as well as the two police officers. It outlines their habits. She was stalking them, Ronan,” she told him. “And, if I don’t miss my guess, I’d say that’s ketamine in that vial on the desk. I don’t think the assistant DA is going to have any trouble getting a conviction here.”

  There was one way around that. “Unless her lawyer goes for an insanity plea,” he pointed out.

  “Either way, she’s going to be locked up for a very long time.” It was hard being in the presence of so much evil. She pressed her lips together and glanced toward the living room. “You know, the real victim here is that poor woman in the other room. She’s lost her husband, most likely her son if Olivia actually did kill him, too, and now her daughter.”

  Ronan nodded, a grim expression washing over his face. “Let me see if I can find that aide’s phone number,” he told her, although he wasn’t having much luck so far. “And then I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “Unless it’s to interview Olivia’s coworkers to see just what kind of hours she did keep and if she was missing when the evening executions took place, I’m not interested,” she told him with finality.

  “Okay, let’s go with that. We’re interviewing her coworkers.”

  “You’re just saying that to get me to the hospital,” she accused.

  “Over my shoulder, fireman style if I have to.”

  “Fireman style?” she echoed. “You can’t just toss out terms like that,” she told him. “You forget, I come from a firefighting family.”

  “Good, then you know what to expect,” he said.

  Ronan was about to carry out his threat, temporarily forgetting about the old woman in the living room, when he heard a commotion outside.

  Sean and his team had arrived.

  “Looks like the cavalry’s here,” Ronan announced. “And you are out of excuses. You’re having that looked at by a doctor,” he informed her in a no-nonsense voice. “Just think you can only catch half the bad guys if you have only one arm.”

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” she fired back. “All I want to do is file this report and then celebrate at Malone’s at the end of the day.”

  “And you’ll do all that,” Ronan promised, turning her toward the doorway. “Once you get that shoulder checked out.” He saw Sean walk into the living room. “Back me up, Uncle Sean. She’s resisting going to the ER.”

  Sean took one look at the blood on her shoulder and said, “Go. Gangrene is not something you want to fool around with.” And then he looked at the woman elevated in the hospital bed, seemingly completely oblivious to everything that was going on around her. “What about her?” he asked his nephew as the rest of his crew went to work.

  “Her daughter—our serial killer,” he added, “usually takes care of her. She has an aide spelling her, but so far I haven’t been able to find the phone number for her.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll call social services. They’ll have someone out here before we’re finished. Now take her to the ER,” he told Ronan, nodding at Sierra.

  She blew out an exasperated breath. “I said I’m all right.”

  “Not yet, but you will be,” Sean told her. “Now go,” he ordered. “I’m not going to be the one making excuses to your father about why his daughter wound up with gangrene.”

  That had her looking at the older man in surprise. This was the first she’d heard of this. “You know my father?” she asked.

  “That, I do,” Sean asserted. “It’s a small world,” he added before repeating his order to his nephew, “Now take her to the ER.”

  Because she felt herself growing steadily weaker, Sierra surrendered and allowed Ronan to drive her to the hospital.

  * * *

  “SEE? I TOLD you I’d be all right,” she told him nearly five hours later.

  “Yeah, that’s what you said. But some things a man wants to verify for himself,” he informed her as they walked into her house. Turning on the light, he closed the door behind them. “And I wasn’t about to take any chances that you were going to wind up suffering some kind of awful consequences just because I walked out of the room and you wound up getting stabbed.”

  “Oh, so this was all about assuaging your guilt?” she teased.

  “No,” he told her, turning her around so that she faced him. It had been one hell of a day and he was just relieved that it was over—and that she was all right. “This is about making sure that you stayed as perfect as you were.”

  “‘Perfect,’” she repeated incredulously as she stared at him. “Me.” He had to be setting her up for something, she thought.

  But he looked entirely innocent as he said, “You see anyone else standing here?”

  “No, but—”

  “Not that you’re going to be standing here for long,” he interjected.

  She couldn’t read him right now and that bothered her. “Oh?”

  “No,” he told her. “I think you should lie down. In bed.” He paused and then added, “With me.”

  Now it was beginning to sound like him. “Anything else?” she asked.

  “Oh, a great deal ‘else,’” he admitted. “But due to your condition, we’re going to have to take it slow.” He was kissing her between each word, between each expressed sentiment.

  She could hardly catch her breath. “Hey, slow down,” she told him. “Those pills they gave me at the hospital are making me dizzy.”

  “News flash,” he quipped, a very wicked smile curving his lips. “It’s not the pills that are making you dizzy.”

  She looked at him with wide eyes. “Oh?”

  “It’s me,” he said, still punctuating each word with a kiss, deeper ones now.

  With a contented sigh, she smiled up at him. “Maybe it is.”

  “And maybe you should stop talking and save your strength for something far more important,” Ronan suggested.

  “Maybe I should,” she agreed as she wound her arms around his neck.

  The next moment he sealed his lips to hers while carrying her to her
bedroom.

  There was no need for any conversation after that for a long, long time.

  Epilogue

  “You know, I’ve never seen so many good-looking people in one spot before,” Sierra commented, looking around at all the people, a good many of them Cavanaughs, attending Christian and Susannah’s wedding.

  After spending several grueling weeks, first hunting for the serial killer and then helping to put together an ironclad case against Olivia, it felt wonderful to just focus on enjoying herself with the man who had stolen her heart.

  Ronan slid in next to her, joining her at one of the small tables that had been set up throughout the grounds behind Andrew Cavanaugh’s house.

  “Sure you have,” Ronan said. “You were at Uncle Andrew’s last party, the one he held for Shaw when he became the new chief of police.”

  “Not the same thing,” Sierra protested. “Everyone was dressed in casual clothes then. Now all the men are decked out in tuxedos and the women look like they’ve stepped out of the pages of a high-end fashion magazine—not to mention that the bride is an absolute knockout.” She looked at the newly wedded Susannah Quinn O’Bannon.

  “Is she?” Ronan asked innocently, never taking his eyes off Sierra. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Hadn’t noticed? You’ve been less than ten feet away from her throughout the entire ceremony, Mr. Best Man.” Sierra laughed.

  He was working up his nerve to ask her something and Sierra wasn’t cooperating. “Sorry, I guess my vision’s been obstructed. How did that old classic song go? I only have eyes for you.”

  She looked at him. Ronan was acting rather strangely ever since they’d gotten back from the church. “Since when do you know the lyrics of old classic songs?”

  A smile slowly curved his mouth as he went on looking at her. “Since this uppity little know-it-all with the fantastic mouth came into my life and upended just about everything in it, bringing nothing but total chaos in her wake.”